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Comment by 0xNotMyAccount | Hacker News Reader

It's a holdover from the days of Morse code. Recall the first computers were for military problems, and the first output was teletype. Teletype was originally for military messaging and that had a long history of using all caps because they relied on manual transcription of Morse code (and other codes) over wire and radio. The all-caps policies were put in place to make sure the officers could consistently read what the operator had transcribed. Some of these date back to the 1850s. The Navy didn't actually do away with all-caps until 2013.

https://www.al.com/wire/2013/06/navy_puts_all_caps_communica...

https://www.doncio.navy.mil/chips/ArticleDetails.aspx?ID=489...

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I think this makes more sense (or at least gets more directly to the point) than any of the Stack Overflow answers. Lowercase is easier to read in print as our minds learn the shapes of the words and can interpret whole words at a time rather than letter by letter. But Morse code was originally transcribed by hand, and it is easier for sloppily written lowercase letters to be mistaken for one another than the more distinctive uppercase letters, so it became a standard to write in uppercase. This tradition carried on to teletype and early terminals until both cases were supported.

As someone who had extremely poor handwriting as a child (it is still not great...), it makes a lot of sense to me that they'd land here.

Over the years, being regularly mocked/embarrassed/reprimanded over my handwriting and often forced to re-write assignments led me to develop a weird print ~hybrid casing that substituted a fair number of uppercase forms anywhere my lowercase forms caused trouble.

(This is mostly a fallback when someone can't read my cursive, or for official forms, package labels, etc. For the same reason I also adopted a smaller number of uppercase print capitals in my cursive.)

When it isn't socially appropriate to use ALLCAPS or come across as a sTRANgE pERsoN, I have to be fairly careful/attentive when writing in print to avoid dropping into mixed case.

(I'm not a monster; I'll scale these more like smallcaps when I write them.)

Terrible writing is why I got into computers so much myself. We live in a world where I barely pick up a pen any longer and I love it.

It's been a few decades, but I recall having to write in all caps in my high school drafting class. We were told the all caps and the letterforms we were told to use helped legibility when the drawings are stored on microfiche.

We were still taught that in high school in the late 90s. Probably some of the last. You are correct. Here's a good example of drafting from the 1960s: https://i.imgur.com/tXozAMy.png

It's not just all caps, but a flowing, easy-to-read style of all caps.

Hard to believe people used to draw all this stuff by hand. I was never very good at it.

> The Navy didn't actually do away with all-caps until 2013.

And aviation still is full with it. For better or, in my opinion, worse... but aviation is so stuck of outdated and inconsistent crap in general...

Airbus did an interesting job reinventing aviation typefaces, including handling ALL CAPS scenarios explicitly: https://b612-font.com/

Most recently discussed three months ago:

* 466 points, 94 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37517567

From 2019:

* 429 points, 154 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18946601

* https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=b612-font.com

This is the nicest monospace font I've seen in ages!

Hard disagree.

The header image on the website shows slashed zeroes, but the font preview doesn't, which is unexpected. In fact when previewing in Google Fonts there's barely any visual distinction between uppercase letter O and zero. There's only a very slight difference in width which you actually have to look for. Punctuation isn't centered in their box and leaves so much tailing space the test text `5240N 15:01 .84 8,9` reads like `5240N 15: 01 . 84 8, 9`

These problems don't exist as much in the variable width font, where there is no tailing space in the punctuation and the uppercase Os are rounder.

There's also some weird pinching in the corners of N. 1, l and I are perfectly distinguishable though, so at least it's got that going for it.

Letter O vs zero is really bad indeed. Also the parentheses characters are very poorly done - far too similar to the square bracket characters.

The hollow zero vs slashed or dotted zero thing is often done in fonts with an extra variant; basically the font can contain both and will display what the application requests. So you should assume that the font really does have the slashed zero, but the font viewer you looked at it with didn't ask for it.

For web, https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-varian...

That's a good point. I added that rule (font-variant-numeric: slashed-zero;) to the font preview using the browser's devtools, and I saw no difference.

Flight booking systems still seem to be stuck with it, even newer fields like email are always in all caps.

Probably because it's a CICS program written in Cobol running on a mainframe.

Also, for decades teletypes used 5-bit 'Baudot' codes. 2^5 = 32. (LTRS) A shift-key (FIGS) could be used for number digits and most punctuation. (Telegrams shown in old movies are almost always upper-case only.)

7-bit ASCII (2^7 = 128) didn't start to show up until 1963. (Starting the arguments.)

Funnier: the machines used gears inside that limited how fast it could type. (60wpm on the low-end ... Which also made it hard to 'read the mail' of commercial carriers that used 66-75wpm machines.)

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